Category: Notes

Those who predict the future we call futurists. Those who know when the future will happen we call billionaires.

– Horace Dediu

There is no point in being confident and having a small position.

– George Soros

One should not dream of becoming something, one should dream of doing something.

– Narendra Modi

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

– Herbert A. Simon

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

– Marcus Aurelius

Disruption is the art of identifying which parts of the past are no longer relevant to the future, and exploiting that delta at all costs.

– Aaron Levie

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure , risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say, chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac), the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance … even our own existence as a species on this planet. And antifragility determines the boundary between what is living and organic (or complex), say, the human body, and what is inert, say, a physical object like the stapler on your desk.

The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means— crucially—a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them— and do them well.

– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If I am not mistaken this fashionable contempt for “ideology,” or for all general principles or “isms,” is a characteristic attitude of the disillusioned socialists who, because they have been forced by the inherent contradictions of their own ideology to discard it, have concluded that all ideologies must be erroneous and that in order to be rational one must do without one.

– F.A Hayek

Ten men in a room trying to come up with their favorite ice cream are going to agree on vanilla.

– Darren Aronofsky